Moonface

by Angela Balcita

  The distraction beth was referring to in her kitchen that afternoon turned out to be a job. At the Johnson County Administrative Building as a part-time transcriber. After working for a few days, she reeled me in, too.

  It was the end of the semester by then, and after I had turned in my final grades, I knew I didn’t want to sit at home and worry about what the rest of the summer would look like or when the kidney would shut down for good. So, for the early part of the summer, Beth and I sat in the air-conditioned office and listened to recordings of the daily county council meetings through headphones. There were months” worth of tapes that needed to be transcribed just to get up to date, so the work seemed endless. But I didn’t mind the rhythm of it. It was a lot like what I imagined sewing to be, using the foot pedal to start and stop the tape, and hunching over the keyboard to watch my busy fingers at work.

  Charlie liked that I was keeping busy, but wanted to make sure I was getting some rest, too. He’d call me a few times a day just to check that I wasn’t wearing myself out. When I came home, I busied myself by reading or cooking, trying not to dwell on worst-case scenarios.

  “I don’t think you should stress out about the kidney, but I also don’t think you should pretend like nothing’s wrong,” he kept telling me when I got quiet at night.

  The kidney was holding on, as I hoped it would, but it was slowly starting to show signs that it was breaking down. I woke up one morning to find my mouth full of sores. The nurse at Dr. Mousy’s office said it was a sign of end-stage kidney failure. I didn’t talk for a week, and sadly, Charlie didn’t seem to mind.

  “This is what it takes for a man to get some peace?” he joked, poking my ribs so I’d at least smile.

  Then at work one day, I hobbled like an old woman from my desk to the filing cabinet on the other side of the room. Beth caught me.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember stubbing my foot or anything, but I woke up this morning and I couldn’t step down on my big toe.”

  Later, when I wobbled off the sidewalk in front of our house and landed awkwardly on my ankle, Charlie took me to the emergency room. The doctor who tended to me said it was the gout.

  “Huh?” I said. “Don’t old people get that?”

  “Usually,” he said, looking at my chart, “but it’s also a problem for people with failing kidneys.”

  Dr. Mousy was losing patience with me. At my next appointment, she tightened her lip and said, “I think it’s time to get you some treatment.”

  “Just a little bit longer,” I pleaded. I didn’t know what I was waiting for. I guess I was just hoping that the future I hadn’t planned for would finally sit right with me.

  Dr. Mousy nodded, but not in a particularly comforting way.

  As soon as I got back to the office, Tammy, our blond, Nordic-looking supervisor who had been transcribing Johnson County Council tapes for years, called me into her office.

  “Look,” Tammy said, pointing with her portly fingers to the monitor on which she had pulled up my most recent transcription. “You keep putting words in where they don’t belong. Listen to the tape and then read what you’ve written. Your job isn’t to edit the words, it’s to transcribe them.”

  The next day, I was taking my time with a recording, slowing the tape down and rewinding it more often than usual, when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. It was the doctor telling me that my weekly blood test came back and that my creatinine level was 6.6. “It’s time,” she said. “I’m not asking you this time, I’m telling you. We’re doing this now.”

  I hung up the phone and swallowed hard. Tammy was on the phone, interns were shoving metal file drawers shut, and someone at the front desk was ringing the bell for service. Beth tapped away at a computer, wearing those black, puffy, donut-shaped earphones. When I came to her desk, she pulled them down and away from her face. “They’re putting me on dialysis. I have to go,” I said.

  Beth, who usually hides her brown eyes behind her black-rimmed glasses, lowered her chin, looked at me over the frames, and bit her lip. “Oh, man.”

  “I have to go to the hospital. I have to tell Tammy what’s happening. I have to call Charlie. Oh no, how is Charlie going to get to the hospital? What if—”

  She stood up and seemed strikingly tall, especially when she put her hand on my shoulder to stop my breathless rant. “I will tell Tammy. I will call Charlie; I’ll pick him up myself if I have to. You, go!”

  I sat in the car in the office parking lot and breathed into the steering wheel. Then, I drove. I drove down a street called Summit, though there was no summit at all. Just a long, hot road that led to the hospital—an immense brick building that slowly began to fill my windshield as I neared it.

  My kidney was no longer working, which meant that it could no longer regulate my blood pressure and clean my blood of toxins and waste. Eventually, I’d stop urinating, which meant my body was starting to hold on to liquid—swelling first my ankles and my hands, and then eventually flooding my whole body. My kidney had been working twenty-four hours a day to clean my blood, and now that it couldn’t do that, I needed a machine to do that work for me. That treatment was called dialysis, during which long tubes would pull the blood from me, run it through the machine to clean it, and drain it back into my veins.

  The problem now was how to get to my blood. Dr. Mousy had wanted me to get the fistula in my arm for weeks now. The surgery of fusing together a vein and an artery of my arm together to make one big superhighway for the big dialysis needles was not an immediate solution. The new vein needed time to heal and grow. But since I needed a dialysis treatment right away, I had to get temporary access through a vein in my neck, or a catheter, which needed to be surgically inserted.

  A nurse had me lie on a table in a procedure room and began cleaning off my neck with Betadine swabs. Dr. Mousy stood over me, too, claiming that this was a minor procedure and that I wouldn’t feel anything. I kept my face tight and still as I looked up at her, telling myself that this was nothing. But soon my face was covered by a paper sheet and there was tightening in my neck. A surgeon who I couldn’t see pulled and tugged at my skin as he twisted and turned a tube through my jugular. Before I knew it, I was taking shallow breaths and feeling the tears stream down my face, not really knowing if I was crying from the pain or from the fact that I was actually going through this, that this was happening.

  “Over!” Dr. Mousy finally yelled. “See?” She pulled the sheet from over my face. “Rest here for a while. Let me talk with the nurses about when we’ll get you on the machine.” I heard her clogs as she stomped out of the room. I opened my eyes to see sinks and cabinets far off to the left and pale green tiles that worked their way up from the floor and onto the walls. I couldn’t yet turn my neck to the right because of the pain and the bulki-ness of my new appendage, but I could tell that I was on a very small table in a very big room. And I felt so lonely.

  Dr. Mousy came in again to tell me they’d call me in soon. “And Charlie’s here,” she said. He stood behind her, leaning against the doorjamb, the sleeves of his chambray button-down folded up to his elbows. “We’ll start the dialysis in a few minutes. For now, I’ll leave you two alone.”

  Charlie leaned over me and pushed away a teardrop on my cheek with his thumb. “Why are you crying?” he said, though he knew the answer. His voice was quieter than I’ve ever heard it before. “There’s no reason to cry.”

  He helped me up from the gurney, putting his hand between my shoulder blades as I sat up. The catheter swung like a pendant jutting from the side of my neck with tubes hanging from it. We walked in slow motion across the hall to a room as wide and as bright as a cafeteria, but free of tables and commotion. There were just white vinyl seats around a large nurses” station. Each of the seats had a machine beside it.

  A nurse with blond hair and thick black roots walked us through the treatment procedure, showing us the scale where I would weigh
myself upon entry and departure, showing us my assigned seat and machine. “There are blankets if you get cold. You’ll probably get cold,” she said. “Pillows, too, if you need them.”

  Once in the chair, I watched as she flushed my new catheter with a syringe of saline. Then she took the short tubes hanging from it and attached them to the long tubes dangling from the machine. There were buttons she pushed and liquid solutions she shook, but by the end of all her maneuvering, the long clear tubes that tethered me to the machine turned red with blood. I had started my treatment. “We’ll just do a couple hours on the first day, okay?” she said. “Just holler if you need me.”

  Charlie sat in front of me on a stool, reading the digital numbers on the dialysis machine. He was scrunching his eyes over me to see, and then he focused back on me. “See, not so bad,” he said. “There are some good parts to all this.”

  “Like what?” I said, my voice sounding a little hoarse.

  “Well, it seems that dialysis has nothing at all to do with dying. It’s a misnomer: die-alysis. Should be Iive-alysis.”

  “Thank god for misnomers,” I said, smirking.

  “Really!” he agreed. “This is going to make you feel better. For the past few weeks, I’ve been worried about getting a call that you were passed out on the floor or in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. But now, you’re not going to get sick anymore. Now your blood pressure will even out and you’ll quit getting those weird old lady problems.”

  “You don’t even know what this is, Charlie. This is bad. Three hours a day, three times a week.” I opened my hand and looked around the room. “This is like my second home now. It’s like my new life.” I heard the whining in my voice and I tried to trap the sound back into my mouth.

  “Three hours? Do you know what this is? That’s a nap! That’s a long lunch! That’s a couple soap operas and a talk show. Shoot, Moony, it’s nothing.”

  The windows in the dialysis room were black now. It was past seven at night, and I realized that I was tired. The overhead light had been dimmed so the late-night customers could sleep.

  “Have you eaten anything yet?” Charlie said.

  “Not since lunch.”

  Charlie stood and asked a nurse who was passing by, “Can she eat?”

  “Yes, something small,” she said. “Something from the vending machines maybe?”

  “Ah! She loves the vending machines.” Charlie grinned in my direction. “What do you want?”

  I pretended like I was trying to think about it. “I want Cheetos.”

  “You got it!” He stepped from the dimness of my room to the glow of the hall. My machine started a high-pitched beep just as Charlie faded out of sight. Immediately, the nurse with the black roots jogged from behind the nurses” station and headed toward me. She was not even done fidgeting with my machine before another one across the room began to beep.

  “I swear these machines can talk to each other. They try to see how crazy they can drive me,” she said. She was definitely younger than I was, maybe just out of nursing school, but she seemed like a veteran. She pressed a few buttons on the machine and swiftly poured liquid from one bottle into another, as if she were making a cocktail. She set the bottles down at the bottom of my machine, adjusted some tubes, then popped up on her white sneakers and headed toward the other noisemaker. “You should be fine, sweetie,” she called back to me before she turned completely. “Just a little adjustment.”

  I didn’t know what she had done, but now I was supposedly back on track—in a matter of speaking. But, really, there was more recalibrating to do. What now? Is teaching out? How was I supposed to plan for the summer, let alone the semester? This changed everything.

  My co-patients in the dialysis room were few at this time of night. Later, I would learn that the prime-time slots were in the morning—best to get the burden out of your way as early in the day as you can. The few who were there were much older than I—a couple of grandmothers, a droopy old man whom I had yet to see open his eyes or lift his head. These were retirees with time to spare. In a secluded corner of the big room, behind a glass wall, there was one young man who seemed more muscular and fit than the others. He wore an orange jumpsuit and shackles around his ankles. He had his own private escort—a police officer—and they sat in the corner and watched TV. The irony of this man’s situation was not lost on me: he was not only imprisoned by the state, but he was also shackled down to this machine. But as he and the police officer laughed in unison at whatever show they were watching, it seemed to me that the inmate wasn’t really bothered by his situation.

  When Charlie came back, I told him I wished this machine were draining more than my toxins away. I wished it were pulling this disease away, or pulling away everything that’s wrong with my body. “You’d think that if they could come up with something to clean out your blood, they could figure out a way to get rid of the underlying problem, too,” I told him.

  Charlie put a hand down on each armrest of my chair and bent down so his eyes were even with mine: “Then pretend it does. This is a new moment for you. This is the new you. Pretend for a second that everything you’re scared of is getting washed out by this machine. That somehow, you’ll come out of this whole thing feeling refreshed and brand new. Healthy. Maybe even better than before.”

  “Yeah, right?” I said, exhaling with force.

  “Really,” Charlie said, not taking his eyes off mine. “Believe.”

  When I secured a morning time slot the following week, Charlie drove me to dialysis on his way to work. Sometimes Beth picked me up when I was through, or Bonnie, or whichever one of our friends was available. Sometimes I’d stand out on the sidewalk behind the hospital in the hot sun, weary and ready to pass out, and I’d wait for the campus bus to take me back home.

  I quit my job at the Johnson County Administrative Building. Tammy didn’t like me anyway. And I, apparently, was too distracted to pick up another distraction. On the days I had dialysis, I came home from the treatment and I slunk myself down on the couch. Charlie kept all the windows open all day to make sure I could smell the grass and watch the kids across the street blasting through the slip-n-slide. It was, after all, summer.

  After a few weeks of coming home to find me exhausted on the couch, Charlie came into the kitchen one day and offered me his kidney.

  I was standing over the pea-green linoleum counter chopping onions to add to the stir-fry, so my eyes were already a little misty when he said, “I’ll give you mine.” He sat down in front of the kitchen table, laid his forearms in front of him, and entwined his fingers. I joined him, and a low-hanging pendant lamp lit the space between us and made me feel like we were in the interview room on a TV cop show. A comedy wherein investigators in shiny black suits hunched over us. I pursed my lips and waited for the punch line.

  “It makes sense,” Charlie said. “I’m here, I’m healthy, and it would take you off dialysis.”

  The options I had been presented with were clear: I could be put on the transplant waiting list. My father was thinking about donating, but I discouraged him, because I knew it would drive him crazy to be away from his patients for that long. I also did not want to imagine what kind of patient he would be. And my mother, though she was out of consideration because of her hypertension, offered to call in some favors to see if she could get a kidney off the black market. “Those people want to give their kidneys up,” she reassured me when I brought up the ethics of selling and buying body parts.

  But Charlie? The thought might have crossed my mind for a second, but the idea seemed like a stretch. First, he would have to want to do it. And he’d have to be a match. I couldn’t stop thinking about what this would say about me. What kind of person asks her boyfriend for a kidney? I had dismissed the idea almost as quickly as I thought of it, and I had never mentioned it to Charlie.

  It was hard for me to believe that now, as he was broaching the subject, I was slowly getting excited by the prospect of getting Charlie
’s kidney. But I tried to play it cool.

  “We’ve got to get tested. And if you happen to match up, I’ll give it some thought.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’re a match.” He nodded once, as if he knew it to be true. That’s when a girl can start fantasizing and get her hopes up high. When she can stare across a table and see a pale white guy with a five o’clock shadow and a torn old T-shirt and see her Prince Charming.

  “There are stipulations, of course,” he said, squaring his shoulders.

  “Of course,” I said. I was just waiting for them.

  “You’ve got to watch your diet.” I nodded enthusiastically.

  “If we decide to do this, you’ve got to cut out the bacon, the Cheetos, and watch your salt intake. We’ll keep an eye on your blood pressure.” Our dietary habits in recent years had been a point of contention for me and Charlie, seeing as how Charlie had not only the mannerisms and humor of an old man but also the diet of one. Charlie was big on fiber, on an apple a day. On top of that, he was slowly eating less and less meat. Bad news for an omnivore girlfriend who was the main cook of the household. “Chicken, too?” I asked him.

  “Chicken, especially!” Charlie said. “You know how they treat those birds? It’s deplorable.”

  “But chicken is like 90 percent of my repertoire!” I protested. I couldn’t imagine life without my mother’s pork- and shrimp-stuffed lumpia, or her chicken adobo. And lechon. No roasted pig? Ever? I wasn’t sure he was serious about his commitment until one night at a dinner party, when he’d waved off the hostess’s flank steak and dove head first into the tofu meatballs.

  The hostess had then turned to me and said, “You, too? Are you vegetarian?”

  “No,” I’d said, “I’m Filipino.”

  Back at the bargaining table, Charlie was waiting for a response. “Okay,” I said. “A cleaner diet.”

  “No more drinking,” Charlie continued. “I’m talking like one glass of wine at dinner, maybe. And no more smoking your ’occasional” cigarettes.”